2022 can bite my shiny metal ass

When I list out all the stuff that's happened to me in the last 6 months, it seems slightly unreal.

One of my colleagues called it "the crumblies" - you get to fifty and everything just starts to crumble.

Some of it I've written about previously.

• A stroke in my retina.
• Two eye surgeries.
• Toxoplasmosis.
• A permanent blind spot in one eye.

But I haven't shared this fun news: the day I got out of the second eye surgery, I tested positive for Covid.

So I was struggling with respiratory symptoms while recovering from having my eye deflated.

They also put me on a potent cocktail of drugs, which was enough to make my head literally spin those first couple of nights.

And it doesn't end there! Oh no, my friends, fate had more in store for me.

One night I went to pee and it hurt like crazy. Once the pain settled down, I still felt like I needed to pee very badly. Ended up in Emergency yet again and it turns out I'd passed a kidney stone, which had scratched up my most sensitive tubes on the way out.

If that wasn't enough, I accidentally tipped a few litres of near-boiling water across my wrist, giving me a second degree burn about the size of my hand.

So that meant another night at Emergency and regular check-ups with the Burns Unit, who change your dressings and give you other treatments and exercises as required.

Here's what the burn looked like about two weeks after doing it.

(The pictures from before that are a bit too gruesome to share. I accidentally put one of those on Twitter and traumatised a bunch of people.)

I also had to come down from the drugs they'd given me. After the eye surgery, I was on a lot of steroids to keep the swelling under control. And you have to wean yourselves off them ever so slowly.

The last few steps in that weaning were pretty unpleasant. Each time I tapered down my dose, I'd get withdrawal symptoms - headache, nausea, weakness, head-spins. It has given me new respect for my medications.

But I'm now off all of those medications. The Ophthalmologist says the scans are good. The white area on the left scan is the toxo spreading across my retina. On the right you can see it's shrinking away again.

So I'm on my way out of the diseased doldrums. I started running again!

I take my little poodle to Cornelian Bay, which has a lead-free area, so we can do some laps of the track together. It's glorious!

I also returned to kung fu training and managed to kick my big toe during warm-up. It has gone green.

(Ignore the weird vertical lines on that toenail, that's from a very old injury.)

So I'm crumbling, but I'm not toast quite yet!

I'm working on a new book. I'm doing some great stuff at work - follow my Twitter account to get updates about that. And I'm planning a big lazy Christmas break.

On New Year's Eve, I'll punch 2022 in the kidney as it leaves.

Onward and upward.

JR

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I've had a hell of a month

It started with a speck in my vision, which turned out to be a stroke. But not caused by your garden-variety clot! No, I have cat-shit in my eye.

Well, that's what everybody thinks when I say "toxoplasmosis". Which is the likely culprit.

As it turns out, you don't only get toxo from the cat's litter box, you can also catch it from swimming water, badly cooked meat, or even in utero - some folks are born with this parasite swimming in their bloodstream.

Who knows where I got it? My antibodies say I picked it up some time in the past.

The Opthalmologist wanted to be sure that's the cause of my eye problems, so he took a tiny sample of my eyeball fluid for testing. But the lab got no result.

So now it's time for more drastic measures.

This week I've had a vitrectomy. He basically sucked all the jelly out of my eyeball and reinflated it with new goo. It left me with a great shiner, more blood on the eyeball, and a very dilated pupil.

This surgery gives the lab a lot bigger sample to work with, so they can run more tests.  And the material is from right next to the infection, so there's a better chance of identifying it definitively.

It also cleared the cloudiness out of my eye. I've had a soup of crud in there and a million floaters, so it's a blessed relief to see more clearly.

I have finally started on the toxo medication, which is quite a complex cocktail - 17 pills a day!

It took the hospital pharmacy a while to find all the drugs I need. One of the components is an old fashioned sulphur based antibiotic which has been surpassed by modern medications... except in treating this one disease.

It's rarely used and out of copyright, so very few drug companies can be bothered making it. The hospital Pharmacist found some packets in Spain which were imported (and translated!) especially for me.

You start with a superdose, so last night I had to take this massive amount of medication with dinner and it left me wired. I didn't sleep for a second.

It's the first all-nighter I've pulled in years. I'm still wired as I write this the next morning.

So yeah, a hell of a month.

July was meant to be a glorius mid-winter holiday for me; fishing with my son, writing some new chapters, working on my fitness.

Instead my boy got Covid and I got the evil eye!

But I won't let this crappy month be a complete loss. Today I'm publishing my new book. I've been sitting on it for weeks but I realised that there's absolutely no reason to wait.

Please allow me to introduce Suddenly Super, a teen super hero adventure set in Australia. It's a really fun read and particularly suitable for the young adult in your house.

It's available now at the Kindle Store!

UPDATE 30/7/2022:

My opthalmologist has confirmed my diagnosis with the lab and the latest scans of my retina show the disease is retreating. So the medication is working and my eye is getting better! I may even get a little of my lost vision back again.

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